MOTION PICTURE DIRECTING
THE FACTS AND THEORIES OF THE NEWEST ART
By PETER MILNE
_Motion Picture critic for over six years on
Motion Picture News, Picture Play Magazine and
Wid's (Film) Daily; and member scenario and
production department of Famous Players-Lasky
Corporation._
_Published and Copyrighted by_
FALK PUBLISHING CO., Inc.
145 West 36th Street, New York
_Used as a Supplementary Text in_
New York Institute of Photography
NEW YORK CHICAGO BROOKLYN
Copyright 1922
by
FALK PUBLISHING CO., INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CONTENTS
The Great and the Less Great 8
The Picture Sense 20
Preparation for Production 29
The Method of William De Mille 37
Cecil De Mille Also Speaks 47
When Acting Ability Helps 57
Rex Ingram on “Atmosphere” 61
Mainly About D. W. Griffith 70
Mountains and Molehills 82
Some of the Arts of Slapstick Comedy 90
Other Tricks Up Directors' Sleeves 100
Some Words from Frank Borzage 110
What Tempo Means in Directing 120
“Overshooting”—and the serial 126
The Method of Thomas H. Ince 135
Directors Schooled by Ince 146
Who Creates a Picture 152
Music in Picture Production 161
Just Suppose 165
“Stealing” an Exterior 176
The Importance of the Art Director 183
Directorial Conventions 189
Ernst Lubitsch: German Director 195
Joe May: German Director 205
Illustrating the Use of Detail 213
Marshall Neilan Summarizes 219
“Best Directed” Pictures 229
PREFACE
The observations on the art of directing motion pictures included in
this book are not by any means intended as lessons for the layman with
ambitions pointing him toward this goal. To teach the craft through the
printed page is as impossible of accomplishment as instructing a
steeple-jack in his trade through correspondence school. “A director
must be born, not made.” This old adage, adapted to our present
situation, is of a necessity partially false, inasmuch as at the time of
the present day directors' initial birthdays there was no such thing as
motion picture production. Still it is true in a sense. Because to
direct for the screen requires a personality and an ability, blending so
many elements of generalship and technique that to studiously acquire
them is next to an impossibility.
Be that as it may, the motion picture of today is developing its own
directors. It has reached out to all businesses and arts and drafted men
who are now headed for top positions in the ranks of directorial
artists. Besides it offers the most humble of the studio staff the
opportunity to rise to the top.
During recent years cameramen, property men, authors, continuity
writers, artists of brush and of pen and ink, actors and business men
from varying lines have become identified with the art of motion picture
directing. The law of averages has declared that many of these should
fall short of success. Many have. But others have succeeded, have
succeeded even beyond the expectations of their sponsors. Therefore it
may safely be said that the gates to the field of motion picture
directing are ready to open to all-comers, provided that the aspirants
have the inborn abilities and personal makeup that are rigidly required.
These abilities, essential qualities and characteristics are dealt with
in the following chapters by the undersigned who has spent nearly ten
years in the motion picture industry, serving in the capacities of
critic and continuity writer.
These abilities, essential qualities and characteristics are, therefore,
set down here as first hand observations. But they are never intended as
lessons that will produce immediate results in the way of lucrative
positions. No reader of this volume can go dashing home to his eager
wife with that much advertised greeting: “Dear! I've got that job! The
New York Institute's book on directing produced 100 per cent results!”
It is hoped, however, that it will give those who have the patience to
peruse it something of an insight into the tremendous responsibilities
that rest on the shoulders of the conscientious director. At present
most people seem to believe that that line on the screen: “Directed by
——” just stands for a lucky fellow having a grand and glorious fling
within the walls of a motion picture studio.
PETER MILNE.
_With grateful thanks and appreciation for the
views expressed therein by Marshall Neilan,
William C. De Mille, Rex Ingram, Cecil B. De
Mille, Frank Borzage, Edward Dillon, Ernst
Lubitsch; and the representatives of D. W.
Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, and other artists
herein referred to, whose co-operation has made
this book possible._
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT AND THE LESS GREAT
_Emotional experience and the capacity for
enduring and retaining mental pictures of such
experiences—these constitute the chief asset
that distinguishes the master director from the
rank and file. Practical explanations and a word
of warning_
CHAPTER I
What is the fundamental asset that makes the great motion picture
director? The requisite that distinguishes the real artist from the rank
and file? It is really the same asset that distinguishes the great
artist in any walk of art from the less great.
When you put this question to a selected group of directors you are
liable to receive a different answer from each one. In fact several were
approached on the subject before this chapter was written. And very few
of them agreed with one another. A still smaller number hit upon what
seems the correct answer to the question.
It is quite true that the ability to “feel” a story and each one of its
individual scenes, counts a lot in a director's favor. The proper
“atmosphere,” the director's ability to achieve it, is vastly important.
So also it is important to have the ability to properly “visualize” the
continuous action of a picture even before the cameraman has once turned
his crank.
But after all has been said and done on these scores it remains that the
one determining factor that distinguishes the great from the near-great
in the picture producing art is experience.
Other requirements are important, vastly so, but first of all and in
capital letters EXPERIENCE.
It is fondly hoped that no one will presume to take this literally to
the very capital letter. To produce a realistic crook story a director
must not, of necessity, turn Raffles for a night. Nor to portray the
effects of African “yaka water” on a white man, must he subject himself
to a long siege of the drug itself. And doubtless a capable director can
successfully picturize the life of a pearl fisher without diving into
the briny deep.
Such specific experiences are not within the span of any one man's life.
A director might know Africa thoroughly, might know what “yaka water”
was as well as a “madeira chair” and then be handed a manuscript
containing such nautical terms as “chain box,” “capstan,” “seacock” and
“chain cable.” As a consequence a director must always hold himself in
readiness for research work when a 'script containing such foreign terms
comes his way.
But these experiences are largely physical experiences. And they are
very minor when it comes to a summing up. No matter what peculiar terms
and words are used in a story, it is the emotional content of it that
counts as of greatest importance. Therefore the director with the most
complete groundwork of emotional experience is the man most properly
equipped to rise above his fellows. This groundwork of experience takes
the shape of an emotional arc, an arc that includes on its line points
representing each human emotion of life, reduced to specific and
commonplace fundamentals. The more points of emotion upon the director's
arc, the better craftsman he is.
Diagrams properly don't belong in books written upon an art such as
directing. They should be confined to volumes on mathematics and
astronomy, but a simple one introduced here will assist in illustrating
the above point clearly.
[Illustration: A—SUFFERING. B—SACRIFICE. C—LOVE.]
Now let the arc pictured illustrate the entire span of emotional
experience possible for a certain man, our great director, to have
undergone. Say that the line and point A represent the emotion of
suffering.
Our director has suffered in his early career. Perhaps he has slept on a
park bench on a cold night with newspapers stuffed among his thin
clothes to guard against the wind. His sleep has been fitful and in his
moments of awakening he has thought the whole world against him—and
roundly cursed it. In the morning he has risen with his bones aching and
not even the two cents in his trousers necessary for the purchase of a
cup of boiled muddy water called coffee down the line at Ben's Busy Bee.
This is a not uncommon case of suffering, specially in the world of
make-believe, where genius is raised from poverty to affluence sometimes
within the short space of a single day.
But while it is being experienced it is doubtless one of the most
terrible adventures ever visited upon a human being. As a consequence in
later years this experience of acute suffering remains stamped,
consciously or subconsciously, on the individual's mind.
Now to the point where this experience will tell when the individual has
become a director. The director is called upon to stage, we will say,
the scene of Napoleon, a prisoner of the European powers on the island
of St. Helena.
[Illustration:
REX INGRAM, DRILLING SOME OF THE VARIOUS “TYPES” OF “THE FOUR
HORSEMEN” IN THEIR PARTS
]
[Illustration:
GEORGE FITZMAURICE TRANSFERRED “PETER IBBETSON” TO THE SCREEN
RETAINING ALL ITS RARE CHARM
]
How can the director know how Napoleon felt? What does he know about his
attitude of mind? The answers are he knows everything. Back in the
photographic gallery of his mind he reaches for that scene of himself on
the park bench. He recalls that that was the night during which he
suffered, in his own mind, even to the extent that Napoleon had
suffered.
Therefore, still in his mind's eye, our director refers to his arc of
emotional experience. The point A represents the height of his
suffering. He then merely extends the line A out and beyond his own
emotional arc until it crosses the emotional arc of Napoleon at the
point where he suffered the tortures of defeat, disillusionment and
imprisonment.
On the other hand perhaps the scene of suffering that our director will
be called upon to reproduce on the screen is one less important or vivid
than his own. It might be a scene of a little boy stammering out his
first lesson in school. Suffering, to be sure, but not of such great
magnitude. In this case the line A is merely extended downward until the
little boy's emotional arc is reached.
To reduce such a process of the intellect is indeed dangerous. An
individual's emotional experience is no matter of diagrammatical
science. However this science is purely imaginary. The whole process is
carried out in the director's brain. It is only the fact that it is here
reduced to cold type that makes it seem rather brutal.
Perhaps certain directors will scoff at the idea but to those it may be
replied that they use such a process of reasoning whether they know it
or not. The whole working out of the scheme is mechanical and
subconscious to a certain extent.
Perhaps, too, there are those among the directors who believe that their
moments of supreme suffering, park bench or otherwise, were far greater
than Napoleon's sufferings. Nevertheless their own arcs of emotional
experience still serve their good steads. Such a director merely
reverses the process and goes _down_ the line A until he reaches what he
believes the arc of Napoleon, instead of going _up_ the line. Such
conceit on the part of the director does not, however, lead to the best
results.
By the same process the director is able to live in his mind the
greatest case of self-sacrifice that the world has ever known, provided
that at one time in his career he has made a self-sacrifice that loomed
of tremendous proportions at the time. His line of sacrifice, B, is
followed to the point where it cuts the arc containing the greatest
sacrificial act of the world. And of course on the line, B, as on all
the other lines from all the other points innumerable other arcs cut
across representing cases of emotion between the greatest and the
humblest.
And so by his own experience, no matter how small or how large it is in
comparison to the experience he is to picturize, the director is able to
give a realistic and sensitive representation of it on the motion
picture screen.
The case holds the same with all the other emotions of life. Perhaps
with the case of love it is a bit different. For in the matter of other
emotions the director may grant that someone else has experienced them
in greater degree than he. But with the matter of his own romance or
romances—no! All directors have no hesitancy in claiming, only to
themselves of course, that theirs is the greatest in the world.
Consequently there is no line C, but just the point. It is stationary.
The director follows it neither up nor down to reach out for some
similar point on another arc. Thus it is that romantic scenes are quite
the most frequently done realistically and properly of all the emotional
scenes contrived for the screen. This time the director's conceit does
not stand in his way.
For the rest the great director's arc of emotional experience contains
every emotion, every cross and mixture of emotions, that he has lived
through during his life. His arc contains hundreds of lines, each one
distinguished from the other by less than a hair's breadth. And yet,
when he comes to employ the arc in his work, the exact line he desires
immediately stands out in bold relief from the others and the director
sets to work upon it.
Thus the greatest directors of today are the men who have run the
greatest gamut of emotional experience. To converse with D. W. Griffith
is to instantly realize that here is a man who has suffered, sacrificed,
lost, loved, triumphed. His brain is a storehouse of emotional
experience, his own particular arc contains so many points upon it that
a dozen times a dozen alphabets would not suffice to represent them all.
Thomas H. Ince has confessed to tramping Broadway searching for work.
Chance led him to the old Biograph studio. Today he is among the
greatest producers in the art. And it is a safe wager that his
beginnings and struggles have not been obliterated from his mind by his
success—rather they have been responsible for it.
Charles Chaplin, greatest comedian in the world and his own director
gives evidence in each of his pictures, mute, grand evidence of the
sufferings, the sacrifices, the little joys and triumphs of the days of
his youth when he had nothing.
And so does every great director today show in his pictures, whether he
knows it or not, the experiences in his emotional career.
And let it be said also that the less great display a remarkable lack of
experience.
It must be reiterated here that these chapters are not to be taken in
the light of a text book. The writer would have a holy horror of having
on his mind a happily married family man, who tossed up his business and
his bank account to sleep on a park bench, and who tossed up his wife
and children to enter upon one illicit love affair after another, just
to complete his arc of emotional experience, because it has been stated
here that the fullest arc produces the best results.
Such experiences must come naturally. The great director is a born
artist. The born artist is a natural vagabond and nine-hundred and
ninety-nine people of a thousand are not natural vagabonds.
After this fundamental requisite of experience come a dozen other assets
that go to make the good director—the great director. The ability to
handle people, to be a master of men, the knack of “visualization,” to
inject those little touches into a scene that perform the miraculous act
of “getting under the skin,” to achieve a proper and telling
“atmosphere,” etc., etc. These requisites will be dealt with in other
chapters, sometimes by the directors themselves.
But no matter how important these other essentials loom it may be stated
again that first of all EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE counts.
CHAPTER II
THE PICTURE SENSE
_Every director who consistently derives a
living from picture making has in more or less
degree the power of visualization.—Without it he
would be unfit for his position.—The conclusion
that this “power” is mere common sense applied
to picture directing_
CHAPTER II
All our directors are not great. There would be no fun for the picture
audiences if they were. Fans would be deprived of that greatest of all
pleasures; writing to the magazines to point out that Marie wore silk
stockings going in the door and lace filigreed hose coming out of it.
But in the rank and file of directors whose work appears with regularity
on the screen there are many capable and skilled men—each one, perhaps,
merely waiting the chance or opportunity to step into the limelight with
a pictorial masterpiece.
Most of these directors are noted as “specialty men.” One can do
comedy-drama well, another excels at straight romance, a third has a
particular turn for handling the intricacies of farce. These men are
skilled artists but not great artists. Potentially great, perhaps, but
the full extent of their emotional arcs has not as yet been tested.
What then, a student of the screen has a perfect right to ask,
determines the ability of these men? The answer is, that uncanny sixth
sense necessary to become a director, “picture sense” or more
technically, the power of visualization.
The picture sense is latent in every embryo director. It can be
developed, but no amount of study will acquire it. It seems to be born
in some men just as a perfect tenor voice is born in some men. Study
brings each out but cannot create either one.
The “picture sense” is the art of seeing in the mind's eye, or rather
the mind's picture screen, every scene of the scenario writer's
typewritten manuscript. Readers will probably recall that this
accomplishment has also been set down as the scenario writer's
fundamental groundwork of learning. Thus the writer and the director
have much in common. And this is one reason why so many scenario writers
have become successful directors.
It may readily be seen that this picture sense, this ability of
visualization, is constantly being used by the director. When he first
reads his script he is visualizing it every moment of the way. To
himself he says, “Scene one will look like this, scene two will follow
like this.” He then conjures up before his eye what sort of a set he
will work in, what properties it possesses, how his people will dress,
where they will stand when they go through their emotions, how they will
enter and exit from the scene, and a hundred and one other details.
If, during this process of visualization, the story or one of its
various scenes rings false, then the director is prepared to talk it
over with the scenario writer and see what can be done to set it right.
So right here it may be divined that a director with this sense of
visualization developed to the utmost is a most valuable asset to any
producing company. If, on the contrary, he has to wait until he sees a
scene actually screened before he can detect its flaws and, seeing them,
prepare to take it all over again, the waste time runs into money lost.
[Illustration:
IN “SENTIMENTAL TOMMY,” DIRECTOR JOHN S. ROBERTSON SUCCEEDED IN
RETAINING THE CHARM OF SIR JAMES M. BARRIE'S ORIGINAL WORK
]
[Illustration:
“THE THREE MUSKETEERS” REPRESENTS DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS AT HIS BEST AND
MUCH OF THE CREDIT BELONGS TO FRED NIBLO, DIRECTOR
]
Thus a director with a proper sense of visualization is not prepared to
“shoot” until he has determined that each scene will screen
realistically to the best of his knowledge.
All this may sound perfectly easy to those unacquainted with the inside
of a motion picture studio. It might be surmised that to detect
unrealities in a manuscript is merely a matter of common sense.
But it is remarkable indeed to take notice of the many men, true artists
in their particular lines and certainly possessed of a modicum of common
sense, who have experimented in the directorial field and who have
failed because of this lack of picture sense, lack of the ability to
visualize.
One of the larger producing companies in the field today, which is
constantly seeking new directorial talent, a company that is actually
willing to pay intelligent men to learn the craft of directing, recently
induced an author of national reputation to join its scenario department
with a view of later becoming a director after he had become fully
acquainted with the construction of manuscripts.
This man never had a chance at directing because he never made good in
the scenario department. He didn't, couldn't visualize. And as said
“picture sense” is required every bit as much by the scenario writer as
it is by the director.
Whereas, this highly talented individual failed in mastering the picture
craft, another man, a man who had never written a line in his life, was
given a megaphone and told to go out and “shoot” a picture. This man was
a cameraman, had worked on a hundred pictures and, having the power to
visualize, had developed it to a remarkable degree. The results he
achieved with his first picture have earned him a position with the
producing company as long as he wants it.
The difference between these two “rookies” was just that difference of
“picture sense.” On the one hand was a man with the inborn power of
visualization, on the other hand a man with a total lack of it. The
difference between success and failure.
Because of these conclusions it might be pointed out that picture sense
is a greater asset in the production of pictures than a general
experience in human emotions. The argument might stand if it were not
for the fact that the cameraman-director is not as yet great. Indeed, he
is several degrees below the heights reached by the _creme de la creme_
of the craft. As yet he has only attempted light romance on the screen,
the easiest sort of picture to produce and to produce well as has been
pointed out. As yet his real emotional gamut has not been brought into
play. It is an unknown quantity. When it becomes known we may determine
the degree of the director's greatness.
Every studio has its stories regarding the amusing predicaments in which
a director would have found himself had he not previously taken stock of
the situation and summoned his power of visualization to his assistance.
It might be well to cite a simple case in point to thoroughly bring out
the value of this ability.
For instance, a director came upon the following sequence of scenes in a
scenario he was scheduled to produce: